photo of the Doggie Diner Dog Heads by Scott Beale
Here’s a bit more on what Laughing Squid is all about, beyond what is in our FAQ and what has been written about us in the media. People often mention that they’ve heard of Laughing Squid, but don’t really know what it is that we actually do. Here’s the short version:
Laughing Squid features interesting art, culture & technology from around the web. It is also an independently owned and operated cloud-based web hosting company. Laughing Squid was founded in 1995 by primary tentacle Scott Beale, who is the editor and head curator, joined by several awesome guest bloggers.
So, we’ll try expanding on that a bit more on this blog post, but first, a little history:
Laughing Squid was founded on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco by Scott Beale as a film and video production company, producing documentaries on the surrealist painter Alonso Smith and The Cacophony Society’s Portland Santacon ’96 event. In 1996 Laughing Squid launched The Squid List and for a while Laughing Squid offered publicity and web design services, but then started focusing on web hosting in 1998. In December 1999 John Law joined as a partner in Laughing Squid as head of “special projects”, followed by David Klass, joining as evangelist-at-large.
Here a few things that Laughing Squid currently does and has done in the past:
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ART, CULTURE & TECHNOLOGY – As our tagline suggests, one of the main objectives of Laughing Squid is featuring unique and interesting art, culture and technology. A secondary goal of ours is to help connect the art community with the tech community, by letting artists know what tools and resources are available to promote their work and in turn get the geeks out from behind their computer and experience more art.
- BLOG – We’ve been running a blog since 2003, which we relaunched on WordPress in 2005. There we post about a variety of things mostly relating to art, culture and technology. We also run a link blog where we cross-post things from the main Laughing Squid blog, plus other interesting things we find on The Interwebs.
- WEB HOSTING – Since 1998 we have been providing dependable web hosting services to individuals, artists and bloggers. This is our primary source of revenue. The “business” side of Laughing Squid. If Laughing Squid were a mullet, web hosting would be the short part in the front. The revenue generated from the web hosting side of Laughing Squid helps to fund the art, culture & technology of Laughing Squid. Our web hosting operations are located over at laughingsquid.us.
- PHOTOGRAPHY – Scott shoots a lot of photos, and has been since high school. Here’s over 39,000 photos from 2000-2011. Some day he will get around to scanning and uploading all of the pre-2000 stuff.
- SQUID – Well as you might guess, we love squid. In fact, we’re so into squid that we have an entire link blog devoted to just squid: squid.us
- EVENTS – Speaking of events, Laughing Squid has organized many events over the years. For our 5th anniversary in 2000 we sold out the Great American Music Hall. In 2003 we went to New York and had our big “Laughing Squid: NYC” show at the now defunct CB’s 313 Gallery. From 1999 to 2003, we produced The Tentacle Sessions, a monthly artist salon. Here’s a list of the events that we have organized over the years.
- COMMUNITY – A big part of what Laughing Squid does is connecting people and organizations with other people, organizations and resources in the community. This often includes helping to organize, document (photos or video) or even sponsor an event. A few of the events and organizations we have been involved with over the years include Burning Man, ArtCar Fest, Defenestration, Survival Research Labs, The Cacophony Society, SEEMEN, the extended universe of Chicken John, Power Tool Drag Races, Black Rock Arts Foundation, RoboGames, Santarchy (Santacon), Webzine, the original BarCamp, Maker Faire, dorkbot-sf, How to Destroy the Universe and Hi Fructose Magazine, just to name a few.
- PROPAGANDA – Our infamous logo, created by the super talented Matt Dong, has been making the rounds since around 2000 and shows up on our t-shirts, stickers, mugs and buttons. We also commissioned a series of 10 post cards from some of our favorite artists. Here’s more on The History of the Laughing Squid Logo.
- THE SQUID LIST – Since 1996 we have been running The Squid List, a curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is both an online calendar, as well as an email list.
Yeah, so as you can see, it’s not that easy to give an “elevator pitch” about what we do. For the most part, we like the fact that what we are all about is somewhat ambiguous.
For those of you curious as to where the name “Laughing Squid” came from, here the story of its origin.
